&nb­sp;The de­ci­sion by the world gov­ern­ing body for foot­ball-FI­FA, to ex­pand the amount of teams in the World Cup to 48 has been de­scribed as a pos­i­tive move for T&T, said David John-Williams, the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent. For­mer FI­FA vice pres­i­dent Jack Warn­er, has how­ev­er de­scribed it as fool­ish.

The FI­FA Coun­cil unan­i­mous­ly de­cid­ed in favour of ex­pand­ing the World Cup to a 48-team com­pe­ti­tion as of 2026, fol­low­ing a third meet­ing of foot­ball's su­per­vi­so­ry and strate­gic body at the Home of FI­FA in Zurich, Switzer­land on Jan­u­ary 9th and 10th. From the new for­mat, the 48 na­tion­al teams will be split in­to 16 groups of three, and the top two will ad­vance to a 32-team knock­out stage.

A re­port yes­ter­day stat­ed that the new 48-team for­mat has been drawn up in such a way that there is no re­duc­tion in the over­all num­ber of rest days and a guar­an­teed max­i­mum of sev­en match­es for the teams reach­ing the fi­nal, while the cur­rent 32-day tour­na­ment du­ra­tion is kept, so as not to in­crease the length of time for which clubs have to re­lease their play­ers.

Yes­ter­day, John Williams said he found the change to be very in­ter­est­ing and pos­i­tive, not­ing he will now look for­ward to what will be the al­lo­ca­tion of teams for the Con­ca­caf re­gion, as well as the qual­i­fy­ing for­mat.

The changes al­so in­clude a merg­er of the CON­MEBOL and the CON­CA­CAF- the Con­fed­er­a­tion of North Amer­i­ca, Cen­tral Amer­i­can and the Caribbean Foot­ball Fed­er­a­tions.

CON­MEBOL cur­rent­ly has four-and-a-half places for its 10 mem­bers, while CON­CA­CAF has 35 FI­FA mem­bers bat­tling for three-and-a-half places. The lo­cal foot­ball boss re­fused to com­ment on whether he feels the merg­er will make it even more dif­fi­cult for T&T to qual­i­fy for the World Cup, as it could face the mights or Brazil, Ar­genti­na, Uraguay, Paraguay, Chile and oth­er top South Am­ner­i­ca na­tions, as well as what the top teams from the CON­CA­CAF, such as Cos­ta Ri­ca, USA, Mex­i­co and Hon­duras among oth­ers.

Ac­cord­ing to John Williams, "We will just have to wait and see what the qual­i­fy­ing for­mat will be like. I do not want to spec­u­late what it will be, but what I do know is that we will def­i­nite­ly have to im­prove our per­for­mances on the field." T&T are cur­rent­ly sec­ond from bot­tom in the CON­CA­CAF qual­i­fiers hav­ing lost both open­ing match­es of the Fi­nal Round to Cos­ta Ri­ca 2-0 at home and Hon­duras 3-1 in San Pe­dro Su­la.

Mean­while, Warn­er be­lieves it was fool­ish to ex­pand the amount of teams in the World Cup, say­ing at­tempts should have been made to pro­vide as­sis­tance to the weak­er foot­balling na­tions first.

Warn­er who had pro­vid­ed a pres­ence in world foot­ball's de­ci­sion-mak­ing for small­er Caribbean Foot­ball Union coun­tries, said such a de­ci­sion could not have been ac­cept­ed had he been there, as he be­lieves it will de­stroy the CFU. He de­scribed the de­ci­sion as poli­tal.

Ac­cord­ing to Warn­er he can­not see any coun­try that can host a World Cup tour­na­ment of 48 teams.

The de­ci­sion came fol­low­ing a thor­ough analy­sis, based on a re­port that in­clud­ed four dif­fer­ent for­mat op­tions, name­ly sport­ing bal­ance, com­pe­ti­tion qual­i­ty, im­pact on foot­ball de­vel­op­ment, in­fra­struc­ture, pro­jec­tions on fi­nan­cial po­si­tion and the con­se­quences for event de­liv­ery.

The Coun­cil is set to dis­cuss fur­ther de­tails re­gard­ing the com­pe­ti­tion, in­clud­ing the slot al­lo­ca­tion per con­fed­er­a­tion at its next meet­ing.